From E online

All over America, people are losing their homes, and it seems trivial media sensations are no exception, as Octomom is getting evicted.

Surfing Santas hit the Florida coast- perhaps Santa is considering relocating.

Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman says “peace is impossible” with Palestine.

A man returns a library book- 76 years late.  Luckily, the library is waiving the late fee.

A recent study by the University of Maryland has found viewers of Fox news are more misinformed about political issues than viewers of other channels. It found that they were more likely to believe the following FALSE statements:

• Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring
• The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
• The auto bailout only occurred under Obama
• When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it

The Senior Vice President for Fox News, Michael Clemente, responded the the study, “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.” Ouch.

Check out the study for yourself- does it seem legit?  Should people stop making fun of Fox News?  (Should Fox News stop making it so easy to?)

The goal and vision of the Semantic Web is to create a Web of connected and interlinked data (items) which can be shared and reused by all. Sharing and opening up “raw data” is great; but the Semantic Web isn’t just about sharing data. To create a Web of data, one needs interlinking between data. In 2006, Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced the notion of linked data in which he outlined the best practices for creating and sharing data on the Web. To encourage people and government to share data, he recently developed the following rating system -

The highest rating is for the data that can link to other people’s data to provide context. While the Semantic Web has been growing steadily, there is lot of data that is still in raw format. A study by Google researchers shows that there are 154 million tables with high quality relational data on the world wide web. The US government along with 7 other nations have started sharing data publicly. Not all the data is RDF or confers with the best practices of publishing and sharing linked data.

Here in the Ebiquity Research Lab, we have been focusing on converting data in tables and spreadsheets into RDF; but our focus is not on generating just RDF, but rather generate high quality linked data (as now Berners-Lee calls it “5 star data”). Our goal is to build a completely automated framework for interpreting tables and generating linked data from it.

As part of our preliminary research, we have already developed a baseline framework which can link the table column headers to classes from ontologies in the linked data cloud datasets, link the table cells to entities in the linked data cloud and identify relations between table columns and map them to properties in the linked data cloud. You can read papers related to our preliminary research at [1]. We will use this blog as a medium to publish updates in our pursuit of creating “5-star” data for the Semantic Web.

If you are data publisher, go grab some Linked Data star badges at [2]. You can show your support to the open data movement by gettings t-shirts, mugs and bumper stickers from [3]  ! (all profits go to W3C)

Happy Holidays ! Let 2011 be yet another step forward in the open data movement !

[1] – http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Varish/Mulwad/?pub=on#pub

[2] – http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/lod-badges/

[3] – http://www.cafepress.co.uk/w3c_shop

Well, for starters it’s CHRISTMAS!!

Not so merry for those stuck at airports across Europe.

Terrorists in Mumbia, India don’t take a break, not even for the Holidays!

Michelle Obama helps children track Santa.

Step down or We’ll take you down, Ivorian leader must make a choice.

Americans do love shopping, and we don’t really know how much until the holidays come around.

With the recession fully in gear and an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, 2010 is shockingly the year when shopping made an extravagant comeback.

“The National Retail Federation predicts that holiday spending will reach $451.5 billion this year, up 3.3 percent over last year.”

Online sales alone have increased 15.4 percent this year mainly due to free shipping deals.  In fact, deals are one of the things that get us excited about the holidays, finding that special bargain that makes us feel better about splurging for family, friends, and especially ourselves.

“Even the family dog is getting a little something extra.”  Three Dog Bakery, a pet-supply chain in Michigan reported its biggest day ever Wednesday, since it opened three years ago.

With all of this happy spending going on, consumers are still wary of using credit cards.  Gift cards and cash seem to be a hit in all retail stores, from thousands of dollars of jewelry to a $15 sweater.

Although we may not be spending frugally, we are spending with caution, a lesson learned from the recession.

We know you are probably busy with last minute Christmas shopping…so…

To help you keep up with things in the news, we’ve got you a present:

A few last minute  ”What’z up’z”

1.The 111th US Senate has made history by breaking more filibusters than any other Senate in history.(rapturous applause)

Quite the feat, which is why Senate Democrats are now unanimously in favor of filibuster reform. While these efforts would not eliminate the filibuster, it would change the rules to place a greater onus on the minority trying to block legislation.

For example, all 40 senators involved in filibustering (editor: or are they “filibusterees’?) would have to physically remain in the Senate chamber throughout the filibuster process, which could take hours or even days.

2. Want to decriminalize pot? So does Pat Robertson (in case you are unfamiliar with him this is the guy who blamed 9/11 on the gays and feminists). He said that arresting people for possession is wasting money and “ruining young people.” When Pat Robertson says weed is ok, the first question that comes to mind is… what has he been smoking?

3. Speaking of pot…remember the 60’s? That was the bad ole days of segregation and racism.

It appears some folks have a nostalgia for those times past (the racism part… not the “pot” part).

Council of Conservative Christians is taking issue Marvel Studios for casting a black actor in the roll of a norse god “Thor” in a new movie to be released in cinemas. They are saying “It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves.” Huh?

We think the CCC should take a chill pill or better yet, share some weed with Pat Robertson.

As the end of the year rolls in we at US Democrazy enjoy taking a look back at the last year one last time.

In the days ahead we will be reviewing some of the interesting events in culture, politics and news.

Here are somethings of interest you may have missed in the world of Economics:

The White House has released its official 2010 Economic report.  We won’t flood you with the details, but the President did have this to say:

American families and businesses have paid a heavy price for failures of responsibility from Wall Street to Washington. Our task now is to move beyond these failures, to take responsibility for our future once more.

As stated by the President, businesses have had to pay a heavy price.  Sales dropped last year compared to the previous one.  However, Private Educational Services had an IMPRESSIVE 8% gain… although

With so many Americans out of work and looking to upgrade their skills, it may not be surprising that privately held educational institutions are seeing strong demand for their services.

To get a look at the big stories over the whole year WNYC has given us a time line of the years big economic stories.

Now that we’ve got you thinking about the past here are some questions, brought to you by Calculated Risk, about next year in economics:

1) House Prices: How much further will house prices fall…

4) Economic growth: …It does appear GDP growth will increase in 2011, although GDP growth will probably still be sluggish relative to the slack in the system. How much will the economy grow in 2011?

8) Europe and the Euro: What will happen in Europe? When will the next blowup happen?

We’ll just have to wait and see.  Until then, have a wonderful end of the Fiscal Year!

The results are in!

Census 2010 reported 308,745,538 people living in the United States on April 1, 2010.  Now what?

We’re glad you asked.

The answer is reapportionment.(editor: Huh?)  That’s the act of reallocating the 435 seats available in the House of Representatives.  The outcome of the Census tells us how many congressmen/women are awarded to each state.  As a matter of fact, this is why we have a census in the first place.

In Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution you can find the Founding Fathers’ plans for the census and apportionment process.

Still confused?  Check out this video from the U. S. Census Bureau.